


The foggy, foggy dew

by Naraht



Category: Return to Night - Mary Renault
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-23
Updated: 2014-07-23
Packaged: 2018-02-10 00:58:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2004849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happened after the cave: chapter twenty of <i>Return to Night</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The foggy, foggy dew

It was the dead of night, that chill hour when the dew lies heavy on the grass and sleepers shiver even in their beds. Hilary and Julian crept together, damp and guilty, through the garden and up to the French doors of her sitting room. It was dark; every room in the house seemed dark. Hilary shuddered, feeling still the weight of the earth pressing down upon her, as if she had just crawled from her grave.

She grasped for the only thought that seemed to belong to the waking world: that it was ridiculous for them to enter the house this way, leaving muddy footprints all over the sitting room carpet. There was no reason that they could not have come through the front door, except for habit and the need to save Julian's feelings.

But Julian was beyond noticing. He stood in the sitting room blind as a sleepwalker; she could see his profile faintly outlined against the garden window. The night was clearing slowly; there was a glimmer of moonlight through ragged cloud and then they were plunged once again into the gloom of night. There was a spatter of rain against the glass.

"Come upstairs, darling," Hilary said, not above a whisper. "Let's get you warm. Come with me."

With mute obedience he allowed her to lead him up the stairs. He was still shivering, his hand cold and clammy in hers. _He'll catch a chill_ , she thought, _he'll catch pneumonia._ She knew very well that this was an old wives' tale - pneumonia was, after all, a viral infection - but the pretence of worry delivered her back to something that she might be able to control, something that she could hold onto. 

_You'd be better worrying about shock_ , she thought severely. This was a satisfying self-reproach, if equally baseless. For the moment it allowed her to sweep away the consciousness that she was treating a young man who had tried to end his own life - and very nearly succeeded - barely an hour earlier. As a newly-qualified doctor she had done a six-week rotation at the Warneford Mental Hospital in Oxford; but her mind refused the connection. It seemed to have no relevance here.

They were welcomed into the bedroom by the warm glow of the electric fire. Hilary silently blessed Lisa, who must have come up to turn it on.

In the bathroom she found that she had left her razor on the side of the bath alongside the case holding her Dutch cap. She thrust them both into the medicine cabinet without looking where she was putting them, thinking that she had let herself become slack; she wished that Julian had not followed her in quite so closely, and then wished that her disinclination to have him see the razor had been a purely social one.

"Julian," she said, "you must promise me you'll never do that again."

"No, no, never," he said. And then, "I hardly knew what I was doing."

 _He would say whatever I wanted to hear,_ thought Hilary, then realised that she had asked the impossible. He was not capable of making such a promise - not now, perhaps not ever - for, as he said, he had not understood his own actions. Nor, she suspected, would he ever want to understand.

The gas geyser above the bath was old, but reliable; when Hilary lit the flame it sprung into action with a clanking that would have waked the dead. It might well wake Annie, if Lisa had not managed to square her somehow. Hilary decided with a satisfying recklessness that she did not care what Annie thought of her choosing to take extravagant baths after midnight.

Julian stood looking bedraggled and miserable, staring at the tiled floor as though seeing something else entirely. They had been brought suddenly to a halt; it would be some time before the water was warm enough to begin drawing the bath.

"Won't you take off those wet clothes?" suggested Hilary.

"Yes," he said dully. "Of course."

He began slowly to unbutton his shirt - he was in his shirtsleeves already, his tie and dinner jacket abandoned in the cave where he had shed them. Hilary had to look away, for the process reminded her too much of the grave, solitary ritual which she had interrupted. _I must retrieve his things_ , she thought. _Tomorrow, as early as I can._ If they were found, uncomfortable questions might be asked; one had known the police to be called for less.

She looked back at Julian. He had stripped down to his underpants, leaving his clothes in a sodden heap on the floor, for they were beyond saving. His pallor was striking even in the red light of the electric fire; his bare skin was covered unromantically in goose pimples. And yet his pose was one of nobility in suffering. Perhaps he knew no other. He was uncomplaining still.

Hilary took her bath towel from the rack and wrapped it around his shoulders. She began chafing his arms and chest with it, none too gently, but she was determined to bring back his circulation. Julian bore this for a few moments, then threw himself without warning into her arms.

"I'm sorry," he said, lips against her neck bringing no warmth. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. You should have left me there."

"Darling, don't say that," said Hilary, smoothing the dripping hair back from his forehead. "You needn't say anything. Not now."

"But I must tell you."

"You've told me already."

What she had been able to make out of his story in the cave had been close to incoherent, a mish-mash of bigamy and deception that seemed far more suited to a novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon than to a young man of an impeccably respectable family in the 'thirties. Given what she knew of Elaine Fleming, it had seemed impossible enough that she wondered whether it might not be a fabrication of his mental state, a baseless fantasy fuelled by his mother's rejection. But his distress was real, and there was no more that need be believed for the present.

"You will marry me, won't you?" Julian asked imploringly. "Even now? Please say you will. I told her that I was going to marry you, though she didn't want to hear me."

"I will, darling. Of course I will. As soon as we can."

It was the first time she had made that promise. Whatever else Julian might forget from this night of pain and fear, she knew that he would remember this. It could not be gainsaid now.

Holding him still in her arms, she let her eyes fall closed. For a moment she was back in the darkness, underground. Claustrophobia gripped her; panic rose up in her chest. Her eyes snapped open again. 

Instinctively she reached out for the light switch, which was close at hand. It came on with a cold, clinical glare that left them both blinking in the dazzle. Hilary thought of her mother's nostalgia for the days of gas and candlelight; she concentrated upon this mundane recollection until her heart rate began to slow once again.

Then she patted Julian briskly and reassuringly on the back. "Come through to the bedroom," she said. "You can stand by the electric fire until the water is hot enough."

This he did; and waited, shivering and wrapped in her towel, without further attempts at conversation, until Hilary had drawn the bath. He climbed into the water with an air of trusting acceptance, as though to be bathed by Hilary were no more and no less than he had expected of the evening. He leant towards her as she knelt by the side of the claw-footed tub, her arm resting along its side. The tiles of the floor were cold and faintly gritty against her knees.

"Oh God," he murmured faintly, but nothing more was forthcoming. His cheek was close against hers.

"Yes, dearest."

She had begun to idly wash him, for lack of anything better to do, watching the water bead and run in rivulets down the clearly-defined muscles of his back. She had run the water as hot as she dared without risking first degree burns, and she could see the flush of life satisfyingly beginning to come back into his flesh.

"Don't stop," he said, when for a moment she laid down the sponge. "Please."

He clasped wetly at her hand with an imploring look. It was warm and humid and intimate - and, thought Hilary, remembering how she had looked after her nephew Sam, it was oddly like bathing a child.

"Why ever not?" she said, disturbed by the association and attempting to put it out of her mind. "You can do it yourself."

"It feels real. More real than - all the rest." 

"I was only going to fetch you a glass of sherry," she said. "It would do you good."

"Don't be long, then," he said, reluctantly relinquishing her hand.

Hilary slipped down the stairs with a slightly guilty conscience, feeling as though she were going to an illicit assignation - for, although she did intend to fetch the sherry, which might do him some good, her main intention in making the trip was to speak with Lisa. As she crossed her darkened sitting room, the house was so silent that she wondered whether Lisa had tired of sitting up and simply gone to bed.

But as she opened the door to the hall, there was Lisa lingering in the opposite doorway, as though she had heard Hilary's stealthy footsteps and responded to their call. She was wearing her red dressing gown shot with embroidery of gold, the one that Hilary liked best of all, and though her dark hair was pulled back, strands of it tumbled loosely about her face.

"I fell asleep on the sofa," she said quietly. "I meant to wait up. As soon as I heard you come in and light the geyser I realised that I should have remembered to do it. I'm sorry; I only thought of the fire."

"Of course you shouldn't," said Hilary. "You should be tucked up in bed yourself."

The two women looked at one another. Hilary realised that if Lisa had heard them come in through the French doors, she had been equally able to hear Julian's arrivals on previous nights.

"He's upstairs," Hilary added, before Lisa had the opportunity to ask. "He's had a scare; I have too. But he'll be all right."

She had very nearly said _he'll live_.

"I'm glad," said Lisa.

What had felt sensible and inevitable in the close darkness of the cave now seemed, in the light of Lisa's front hall, nothing of the sort. Hilary thought of the young man shivering upstairs in her bathroom and shivered for a moment herself. He would live - fifty or sixty years, perhaps. Most likely he would outlive her. But there was no use thinking about that now.

"Lisa," she began, "I - "

"My dear," said Lisa, reaching out to touch Hilary's collar, "you're absolutely sodden. Come here."

Only then did Hilary become conscious of the extent of her dishevelment. She had run through a farmyard and climbed down into a cave in the dead of night; her legs and the skirt of her dress were splashed with mud, or worse; she had endured numerous wet embraces from Julian, both in the cave and afterwards. Her dress, which she had loosened to warm him against her skin, was still (she now became dimly aware) gaping half-opened. She reached up to close the buttons with clumsy fingers. It seemed that she had been sleepwalking, just as much as Julian; it had taken the contact with Lisa to bring her back from that shared dream.

She did not protest as Lisa drew her into her arms. After Julian's chilly embrace Lisa seemed vitally alive; Hilary could feel the warm, generous pressure of her breasts underneath the dressing gown.

"Someone should be getting _you_ a sherry and getting you into dry clothes," said Lisa in her soft voice. "You'll get pneumonia."

"One doesn't catch pneumonia from a chill," replied Hilary automatically. "It's not important."

She drew back from Lisa, knowing that she must do so immediately if she were to do it at all.

"Besides," she added, aware that she was salving her own pride, "he needs me more."

"Of course he does." Lisa said it with a tone that made Hilary feel that she was answering a different comment entirely. Without fuss she closed one last button of Hilary's dress. "I mustn't keep you. You should be with him."

 _Should I?_ thought Hilary confusedly. She went.

Three-quarters of the way up her bedroom stairs, she realised that she had forgot the sherry down in the sitting room, and had to go back for it.

When she returned she found Julian getting out of the bath, wrapping the already wet towel around his waist. He accepted the sherry willingly but with little enthusiasm, and drank down the small glass in one draught, as though she had given him a dose of medicine to be taken before bedtime.

By the time that they finally fell into bed together it was after three in the morning. Had she thought about it sensibly she would have realised that dawn was not far off, but at that hour the night seemed beyond endless, an eternal embrace to which they both had willingly chosen to surrender. The moonlight had gone and the darkened windows seemed to reproach her with a consciousness of what she had lost - or given away.

In bed Hilary shivered, pulling Julian a little closer. Though he barely stirred, the watchful tension in his body told her that he was awake as well. A moment later she realised that he was silently weeping. She did not speak; whether it was to save his embarrassment or her own, she did not know, but, feigning her own sleep, she allowed him to retain the pretence of dignity without sacrificing the comfort of her touch. It was the first night when, sharing a bed, they had not made love. 

The rain was pouring down now, relentless. She lay awake and listened to its drumming on the roof.

She awoke suddenly to broad daylight and sat up with a start. Annie would be coming in any moment with the morning tea. The alarm clock, which she had switched off not four hours earlier, read quarter past seven. It was, in fact, half an hour after the usual time of Annie's appearance. Heart beating wildly, Hilary remembered that Lisa had promised to make arrangements; only a few moments later, after she caught her breath, did she think to look over at Julian.

He was sleeping peacefully, and apparently soundly, beside her. His arms were wrapped around a pillow that, as the crick in her neck reminded her, had earlier in the night belonged to Hilary. On his young face there was not a trace of suffering or strain. The previous evening could have been no more than a bad dream.

Hilary got out of bed as quietly as she could, and her movements did not disturb him. She wrapped her dressing gown around her shoulders and stood for a moment in the doorway, looking back, wondering at him. Then she sighed and went downstairs.

She found Lisa in the sitting room, curled up in her usual corner of the sofa with her feet tucked underneath her. One hand was unconsciously resting across her stomach. Though it was still early for her to be showing, even to the trained eye, with the benefit of foreknowledge Hilary could read her condition clearly. She wondered whether Lisa had been to bed at all; when Lisa looked up she saw that her face was shadowed with fatigue. Hilary was overcome with sudden guilt for having caused Lisa, entering into a difficult pregnancy, the least bit of worry. She wanted to beg forgiveness, to throw herself upon Lisa's mercy, but so rarely did such an instinct strike her that she could not think what to say.

"I've given Annie the day off," said Lisa, stretching a little, "but she's left the makings of breakfast. Do tell Julian that he's welcome to come down to eat - if he'd like to, that is. If not, you can bring it up to him."

"Thank you," said Hilary. "But he's still asleep."

It was just as well. Lisa had spoken with her usual unaffected generosity, but there was a faint air of apology behind it; Hilary guessed that Lisa had not forgot - as she had not forgot herself - that she had once as good as called Julian a wastrel. She could not imagine having breakfast with the two of them at the same table in the light of day - her imagination gave it the air of an undergraduate reading party, all in dressing gowns, though she and Lisa were both a good fifteen years past their undergraduate days - for all the world as though nothing had happened.

"In that case," said Lisa, "why don't you sit down and have a cup of tea?"

She had a pot of tea and cups close to hand and began pouring out without waiting for an answer. The rising scent of Darjeeling reminded Hilary that her mouth was very dry, and that her stomach was already protesting at the lack of its accustomed early morning tea. She sat down beside Lisa on the couch

Hilary occupied herself with the tea as long as possible, but Lisa's china was delicate and small. Reaching the bottom of the cup too soon, she felt obliged to put it down and say something.

"I don't know where to begin," she confessed.

Outside there was a clamour of starlings. They had nested in the roof and proved impossible to dislodge, despite the best efforts of the gardener whom Lisa had in from the village one day a week.

"My dear, you needn't begin at all. Not if you don't want to; I've said that already. It's none of my business."

"I suppose you've guessed it all by now," said Hilary, a little hopelessly.

"The essentials? Perhaps."

This last comment artfully combined graceful demurral with an unassuming air of invitation. After Hilary had accepted a second cup of tea, she began to tell, from the beginning, the tale of herself and Julian.

She cavilled slightly at retailing the village gossip about Julian's visits to the house, but after a moment's consideration she convinced herself that Lisa deserved to know, if anyone did. If she was anxious about Lisa's reaction, she need not have been; Lisa only smiled and said that Hilary need not worry on her account.

"Rupert and I have had worse said about us before," she added. "Remind me another time to tell you what happened in Berlin. Ever since then I've told myself that people will believe exactly what they want to believe; it's the same when it comes to the news, as Rupert would say. I'm sure there's been gossip for years, it's just that one usually doesn't hear it when it concerns oneself."

"Some people wouldn't be so understanding," said Hilary. "It seems I've made a mess of things."

"It doesn't seem to me that you had much choice in the matter. Besides, the county is rather proprietorial over Julian Fleming. Anyone with a daughter between fifteen and twenty-five... well, you've read the rest in _Pride and Prejudice_."

The matter of the cave Hilary had thought to treat more circumspectly, as it was Julian's story rather than her own, but it could not be passed over entirely. The mention of Jane Austen gave her an idea of how it could be done.

"Last night he told his mother about us," she said. "That he had proposed, and I had accepted him."

She felt immediately that this was not the way to give her nearest friend in Gloucestershire the news of her engagement. Nor was it strictly true from a standpoint of chronology, but it seemed the closest approach to the truth that was either possible or wise.

Lisa's eyes widened; she reached out to clasp Hilary's hand. "My dear," she said. "My very best wishes. I wish both of you every happiness."

"Thank you," said Hilary. "I gather his mother didn't feel the same way; that was at the root of all the trouble last night."

"No, she wouldn't, would she?" Lisa gazed at Hilary sympathetically. "I suppose she could cause you both a good deal of trouble if she chose."

"It hasn't dissuaded him, if that's what you mean. At least it hadn't last night; one hardly knows how he'll feel in the light of day." 

It occurred to her that this misrepresented her own position somewhat. 

"I've told him over and over again that we needn't rush into anything," she added by way of clarification. "And that I don't expect anything from him - which I never have done, incidentally. He's very young, you know; and convinced that what he feels now, he'll feel forever."

It had perhaps been superfluous to remind Lisa of Julian's youth. Hilary could not help reflecting that Rupert - at forty-four, ten years older than Lisa and only a few years younger than Elaine Fleming - was fully old enough to have been Julian's father.

"Well, why shouldn't he?" replied Lisa. "Perhaps that's foolish of me; I hardly know him at all, no more than comes of seeing him across a dinner table once or twice a year. But sometimes one does know one's own mind. And I should hate to think of you tying yourself to a man if you weren't certain that he loved you, so I can only believe that he does."

"I know he does," Hilary said, feeling obscurely as if she were admitting to something.

"Everything else seems to matter less when you have that," said Lisa thoughtfully. "Even if it involves you in all sorts of difficulties along the way."

"I hope you're right." 

She realised that she would not have said this to anyone else; twenty-four hours ago she could not even have imagined saying it to Lisa. 

"I hope so as well," said Lisa. "But I've found it true."

For a moment Hilary thought that Lisa would reach out to clasp her hand again, but for Lisa this would have been demonstrative indeed. They studied one another for a moment but it seemed that once again they had reached the limits of reserve, or of prudence; there was nothing more that could be said.

"Anyway," Hilary said, more briskly, "I suppose I ought to go and see what he's about. I'm afraid we've been a terrible nuisance to you."

Lisa demurred at this suggestion and, still eager to be helpful, gave her an old dressing gown of Rupert's to take up to Julian. It was paisley wool and smelt strongly of Gauloise Jaune, mingled with a subtle suggestion of Lisa's perfume. Hilary found it difficult to imagine Julian in such incongruously masculine garb, but she could hardly refuse Lisa's generosity, and left the sitting room carrying it over her arm.

Upstairs she found Julian still lying in bed, gazing up at the ceiling with her pillow still in his arms. He glanced towards her as she entered, then smiled brilliantly. 

"There you are."

"You're awake," she said, a flat statement of fact that was actually surprise. Deciding that it was superfluous, she laid Rupert's dressing gown aside on the bedroom chair.

"I've just been lying here and thinking," said Julian, a little abashed. "I actually came down the stairs a little earlier, but I could hear you talking to Lisa across the hall and I thought you probably wouldn't want me barging in. So I came back to bed. Perhaps I should just have gone."

She sat on the edge of the bed by his side. "My dear, of course you shouldn't."

Despite her severity of tone she was relieved, for this was the longest sensible statement that she had had from him since the whole episode had begun. Wanting to soften her rebuke, she reached out to tousle his thick hair, and found it still imperceptibly damp to the touch.

"She saw me here last night, you know; I couldn't help it, she came into the sitting room when I was waiting for you. I didn't know what to say - but then I hardly knew what I was about. It seems like a bad dream already."

He shook his head and a spasm of unclassifiable emotion passed across his face.

"You needn't worry about it," said Hilary. "Not now. She understands; she isn't angry. You're invited to breakfast if you feel up to it."

She would not have been surprised either by immediate, ravenous acceptance or scornful and complete demurral; but instead Julian was equivocal.

"Better not," he said, after due consideration. "Though it's very good of her. You'll want to tell her that I posted the announcement off just before I - before I spoke to my mother. It'll be in the social column tomorrow, probably. Or the day after." He looked up at her questioningly. "Ought I to have waited?"

He must, thought Hilary, have caught a glimmer of the look of horror in her face. It had just struck her, with a disconcerting and unjustifiable suddenness, that this left her no more than forty-eight hours before her own friends and relations would be opening the _Times_ over their breakfast tables to find the news of her engagement. Her parents. Her brothers and sisters. Sam and James and all the other nephews and nieces. Old school and university friends. Sanderson. David.

Odd how she had been so caught up with the opinions of rural Gloucestershire that the thought had never even occurred. They had spent the whole of the previous lunchtime - how long ago it seemed now - having a showy and inconclusive lunch together at the Crown for the benefit of local gossip. Julian had lit cigarettes - her cigarettes - for her with a flourish, and at one point they had held hands not merely under, but on top of the table. Apart from earning them a look of sidelong disapproval from the rubicund landlady, this performance had had no identifiable effect, and Hilary had felt no sense of social shame apart from an unavoidable consciousness of being faintly in bad taste.

"No," she said, "it's better to have it over with." She considered the sound of this and then added: "We owe it to Lisa."

Julian nodded with what Hilary thought was a certain generosity of spirit. 

"I'll get the license," he said. "You needn't worry about anything. I'll take care of it all."

It was an echo of his words on the previous night. In the trance into which she had fallen then, with her only thought being his survival, it had seemed natural to play along. Now it struck her how very desperately he was grasping at an adult competence and control which so far came naturally to him only on the boards of the theatre. To be complete his performance needed no more - and no less - than her willing and graceful surrender. In the cold light of day her spirit stuck firmly at this demand. It was impossible; but she did not think this through in so many words, only responded as her own instinct demanded.

"We've been through this already, darling. Not without asking me. The last thing we ought to do now is rush into the wedding. People will only think that you've been visiting Lisa and me on alternate nights. Or, even worse, on the same night."

Privately Hilary thought this was rather clever but it would almost certainly have gone over better in a housemen's common room. Julian did not seem to notice.

"Of course I would _ask_ you first," he said, annoyed. "I'm not without all vestiges of civilisation."

"Well then. That's all I want." She glanced at the alarm clock, which had been half turned away from the bed; the light from the window glared against its glass face, so that she had to squint to make it out. "Is that the time? I've house calls all this morning; I suppose breakfast will have to wait. Dearest, are you staying or going?"

He looked guilty. "I would go home, only..."

"Quite. I thought not. You can stop here until I get back - or longer, I suppose..."

Her mind jumped immediately into a whirl of future plans. If Julian were not going home, he would have to stay somewhere; having him sleep the night under Lisa's roof had become more thinkable in the short term, but would quickly become impossible once their engagement was officially known, at least if they were to retain any modicum of social respectability. In which case he would need to find a room in a hotel, or even a lodging; she wondered what he had in the way of ready money and whether, if his desire for an early wedding won out, he would expect her to leave the bosom of her comfortable home with Lisa and join him in his exile. She was suddenly annoyed at the overturning of all her plans, at the loss of the familiar predictability of her middle age, but she reproached herself for feeling this - after all, what else could she have expected of marriage?

"...only I've been thinking," continued Julian, as though she had not spoken.

Hilary unconsciously braced herself against this eventuality. 

"It occurred that it might be simpler for everyone if I went up to London and stayed with Chris Tranter - just until, well, until everything quiets down here."

 _Until his mother forgives him for whatever he said last night,_ thought Hilary unkindly. _Or until he forgives her for whatever she told him._ She half wished - and this was unkinder still - that it might not happen. For the first time she felt, abashedly, a sense of triumph that, though her own forbearance of jealousy, she had won him from his mother at last.

"That's really rather sensible of you," was all that she said in reply.

"There's actually a train at seventeen past, if you wouldn't mind terribly dropping me at the station on your way."

This was an unexpected act of decision on his part; Hilary told herself that she would have to learn not to be surprised by him.

"With nothing but the clothes on your back?"

Julian shrugged. "I can buy something in London. I needed shirts anyway. And Chris has all sorts of bits of old costume lying about."

Hilary was so charmed by the notion of Julian clothing himself in cast-aside theatrical garb that her acquiescence came more quickly than it might otherwise have done.

"If you like - if you can be ready in the next fifteen minutes - then of course I will."

"Thank you." Julian sat up and kissed her, sweetly but not wholly chastely. "Thank you. You're an angel, I always knew it. More than that, a goddess. I don't deserve you at all."

He kissed her again. Only last night, reflected Hilary, that last sentence would have been delivered with piteous shivers and an utter conviction of truth; this morning it was a robust declaration of love, accompanied by a vigorous embrace and all the warmth of his smooth, bare skin. He began to caress her, without asking her leave, as though both he and she had all the time in the world. Hilary submitted to this without complaint, out of a feeling that to reject him now would be unutterably cruel.

 _Perhaps he'll stay in London for good,_ she thought, almost wistfully. _Perhaps he'll see things differently, being away. It might be for the best if he did._

A moment later she knew that she would miss him desperately as soon as he was gone.


End file.
